Troy and team, you seemed to have been able to transform a tragic event, i.e., the pandemic, into an opportunity to build scientific literacy while engaging students in a topic of critical importance to them. What are some take-aways that teachers may be able to apply to building scientific literacy through other topics that are important to students?

Hi All, Thanks for visiting our project. This work was made possible through a collaboration among high school science teachers and a team of university-based science educators. When the pandemic emerged, we thought it important to respond to it through science education. As the world has struggled to get a grasp on the science of COVID-19, to make sense of information (and misinformation) shared about the pandemic, and to understand what to do in response, we thought science classrooms ought to be a place to help create solutions. That thinking led us to create materials and support enactment of those materials in science classrooms with the goal of better preparing students for dealing with the pandemic. Please check out the video, explore other project resources through our website, https://epiclearning.web.unc.edu/covid/, and let us know what questions you might have. 

Thank you for this video and this important work. Helping students connect with the science of viruses and the incredible collective science efforts that helped develop safe vaccines is how we help address pseudoscience and support our communities. I'm sure many of the students parents learned from them as well. Nice work!

Really great work, team! I appreciated learning about the curriculum resources and first-hand teacher perspectives. Thank you for including REESE curriculum materials link in the comments, too!

This is such a great project! One question I have is how did you engage teachers during this overwhelming time? 

This is a great project! I am wondering if any of the teachers discovered ways to connect to other content areas through this work in their classrooms?

Hi Colby:

Nice to hear from you.  That's a great question.  We sought a lot of teacher input in regard to when they wanted to meet. During the workshop, they divided into small groups of their choice and worked on developing lessons of their choice - given the tools and ideas we suggested.  All the teachers who participated wanted to create COVID-19 instructional materials and many of them had collaborated in an earlier workshop, so they were really motivated.  I think immediate relevancy, teacher choice, collaboration and flexibility were the key factors.

A socio-scientific approach certainly lends itself to interdisciplinary collaboration.  However, given the short timeline between design and implementation, the teachers in this project did not connect to teachers in other disciplines. In an earlier project, we did have an English teacher and a biology teacher who participated in an SSI workshop and they designed interdisciplinary instructional materials for the class they co-taught.

Hi Troy and team, this is amazing work! Thank you for taking it on and doing so quickly and effectively. I love the relevance to student life and the real-time aspect of it. Digital literacy is a critically important topic and it's great to see such innovation being put into action around the issue. I'm curious about a couple of things; 1) one of the bigger issues over the last year has been the overwhelming amount of data and information, how did the team approach that parsing and filtering process; and 2) part of digitally literacy is questioning sources and motives/agendas, were there any interesting discussions with teachers or students about the validity of the data/information presented? 

Thanks for sharing!

Jaime-Thanks for your interest in the project and sharing your questions. IN terms of parsing and filtering, we (that is our design team including the partner teachers) did much of the parsing so that students were presented with sets of curated materials that we had already sorted through as a part of designed learning activities. However, part of the curriculum included some explicit resources related to digital/media/information literacy which provided students with ideas and tools about just the things you are mentioning: how to filter information, what questions to ask of sources, etc. The specific approaches we used can be found at our website under the Media & Information Literacy (MIL) tab: https://epiclearning.web.unc.edu/covid/.

I'm hoping that one of our project teachers might chime in re: the nation of discussions that emerged with their students about some of these issues. 

This is a wonderful project in so many ways--using a crisis to teach critical thinking skills, making science relevant to students' lives, supporting teachers in their creativity and passion. I am going to enjoy looking at your website and materials that may influence our own project teaching  COVID-base data science to middle school students in afterschool programs. 

A few questions: how do you see these materials being used after COVID subsides? How are you assessing student learning? And have you seen any changes in student attitudes toward science or sense of themselves as scientists?

Thanks for such a great video on using current issues to teach scientific literacy and for sharing your curriculum!

Hello, REESE Team. Thank you for this project and the excellent video. Your materials seem to capture the kind of science instruction we want all students to experience, weaving together content and science practices authentically. One question . . . how quickly do you think materials like yours can be created? When crises like COVID emerge, science teachers need materials like yours. Obviously, you got the materials in teachers' hands in time for them to still address a critical need, which is an amazing accomplishment. What's a reasonable development timeline for materials to address something like COVID?

This project sounds really relevant to students' lives and rewarding for the teachers involved. I'm wondering if you could say a few words about the pedagogy - how are lessons structured, how are discussions organized?    

The project is timely and I think science education is very relevant here. As a science teacher educator, my student teachers also saw the Covid-19 as an opportunity to talk about health science, immune system, virus, and how social issues are connected with science in their class. Another student has just completed her M.Ed project on middle school students' ability to discern rumors/misinformation about science and technology, i.e. media literacy. Looking forward to seeing more outcomes from this project!  

Hi REESE team! I think it is a great resource not only for students but also a great model for teacher educators to think about how to help teacher candidates learn and develop life-related science courses. Thank you for sharing this amazing video and the website.

Thank REESE team for sharing your work! I like the significant collaboration between researchers and teachers! The curriculum materials are so relevant to our current life and greatly help teachers develop student scientific literacy. I am wondering how learning goals for the curriculum were determined and how teachers' instructional repertoire was used for the material development? Thank you again for sharing such great work!

As the university based team that applied for the NSF funding that made the work possible, we had several learning goals going into the professional development work with the partner teachers. We shared those goals with the teachers as we were recruiting participant teachers. During the PD, we began by starting with those goals and having conversations about what teachers saw as the needs of their classrooms. So, in the end the the learning goals were collaboratively generated. 

The teachers instructional practices and repertoires really became embedded in some of the activities as they formed design teams and led the design efforts.

Excellent work! The connection that students will be able to make to this subject matter will really allow students to be invested and empowered to ask questions and think critically. I'd love to learn more about "lessons learned" from the teachers who used this in their classrooms- areas they would like to expand upon, shift focus, or takeaways from student conversations. Well done!

I'm hoping that some of our teacher partners might stop by and share some of their insights. 

As a science ed researcher (former teacher) involved with the project, here were a couple of my takeaways...

HS students had/have lots of concerns and questions about the pandemic and they look to their science teachers as an important source of information. We are all surrounded by information in today's media rich environment, and students were looking to their teachers for help in making sense of what was going on.

The NGSS made some great contributions to the improvement of science teaching and learning primarily through attention to student engagement in scientific practices as an essential dimension of science learning. However, I think what we have seen in this project is that the NGSS do not allow for enough flexibility for teachers to respond to crisis situations. If we find science teachers in the midst of a global pandemic saying that they can’t teach the science associated with the pandemic their students are living though because doing so would not align with their standards, then something is wrong with the standards. This is exactly what we encountered. We worked with our partner teachers to create ways of working around this concern, but that probably was not the norm.

It is a great project. You have a rapid response to current issue and incorporate it to science curriculum. Teachers can use those curriculum in their class. I am sure that students are also interested in learn more about things that is happening in their life with huge effects. I am wondering if the curriculum is difficulty for high school students to understand? How teachers adapt the curriculum to their grade level?

Fantastic video! It's been wonderful working with the REESE team as a graduate student and learning from incredible these teachers and researchers. We will continue to update the website with more Covid-19 activities, so be sure to check it out in the future and share the link with educators. 

Hello Troy and team,

What a fantastic resource and excellent integration of science and society. Is there an explicit framework for the development of your curriculum that educators might use to adapt other topics to this model?

Great work! I really enjoy the idea of connecting live experiences into science teaching. Hope students will gain more emergency/pandemics literacy through such a promising project!

Timely project and an awesome video! The focus on community well-being is super important. Thank you for doing this highly needed work.

Such a timely, interesting, and relevant endeavor in science education!

Great work, great project, REESE team! SSI instruction is one of my favorite approaches to develop students' scientific literacy for being modern citizens. COVID is a perfect and timely SSI that students may realize the power and usability of science when they experienced and engaged in the activities in the curriculum. Given the challenges of virtual learning, I wonder what kinds of evidence (e.g., artifacts) show students have achieved some aspects of scientific literacy that will help them to deal with the future pandemic? Did you have any kinds of assessments that measure students' such kind of transferable proficiency?

The culminating project at the end of the COVID-19 unit challenged students to use a scientific model, find new information (and explain why the sources of that information were trustworthy), and to apply science ideas they had learned to craft policy recommendations for their city. This served as a summative assessment for the unit and offers the kind of evidence of scientific literacy that you referenced. We did not incorporate an assessment of transfer--some of our previous work does suggest that SSI learning can transfer to some extent to the ways in which learners negotiate other issues. But the conditions under which this happens and how to best support this remains an area of active research.

Very nicely done and I look forward to exploring more of your project website. We cannot stress enough the importance of using current and historical issues relevant to student life to contextualize their science learning. In your work, did you include sources of information that students tend to check out related to COVID? What are some of the challenges and successes you experienced to address misinformation issue? 

We have a set of learning activities that specifically addresses media and information literacy.  We ended up working with our partner teachers to develop two different heuristics for students to use around making sense of media and misinformation. Our initial materials were difficult for some students to use, so we created a second approach (really we borrowed from existing work on the CRAP test). For some of our teachers and students, the second approach doesn't go into enough detail --so we found that having both versions available made it possible for teachers to adjust the depth of their student explorations in these areas. You can find these material on our project site under the Media and Information Literacy tab: https://epiclearning.web.unc.edu/covid/

Thanks for this relevant project! I was wondering what the Lexile value is of the reading and am interested to know if before-during-after reading strategies were used.

Science education is becoming more and more closely connected with students' daily life, which allows students to learn science through life and also use the knowledge they have learned to live a better life. Thanks for this timely great work！

Troy and Team,

What a powerful project. I really like your connections to the broader field of social studies and elevating student voices.

Michael, It's good to hear from you again. Thanks for viewing the video.